The world was recently inundated with news on Harare’s plans to take over all alluvial diamond mining in the southern African country.
Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment minister Savior Kasukuwere was quoted as saying that the cabinet had “agreed unanimously" to own 100 percent of all diamond mines under the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act.
“The broad principle that has been set up by government is that the alluvial diamonds belong to the state and they must benefit the people of Zimbabwe,” he said.
Zimbabwe had three existing diamond deposits, which included Rio Tinto’s Murowa Diamond Mine, privately owned River Ranch Mine and Marange fields.
Murowa and River Ranch were non-alluvial diamond mines.
At Marange, three mining firms had been operating joint ventures with the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation (ZMDC).
However, one of the firms, Core Mining, lost its mining rights after its top executives were implicated in fraud.
Kasukuwere further noted that Zimbabwe would own a 51 percent share for other minerals.
He said these decisions would take effect as soon as the laws were gazetted.
It was, however, not clear whether the new rules would affect existing miners and Rough & Polished’s efforts to seek clarity on the issue were fruitless.
The latest pronouncements clearly show that Harare was sending mixed signals over the same issue.
First, it was Industry and International Trade minister Welshman Ncube who announced early this month the freezing of the controversial indigenisation policy.
He said the government had shelved the indigenisation legislation until “the local economy recovers” and would be selling at least 10 parastatals to foreign investors.
A local daily, Newsday went on to report that the “landmark policy climb-down” came as a shock to “everybody who heard government officials swearing categorically and repeatedly at every public forum that the country would never recoil from the programme, treating it with the same sanctity they gave the fast-track land reform programme”.
However, Kasukuwere pulled a real shocker, some 48 hours later when he called for a press conference.
"Government has decided on a Sovereign Wealth Fund whose main objective is to house value deriving from the ownership requirements provided for in terms of the law,” he said in an apparent move meant to shoot down what Ncube had said.
“All new projects in the mining sector are expected to comply with the above requirements of the law."
As if that was not enough chaos, The Financial Times quoted a source from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party as saying that their understanding was that a report on indigenisation had been put forward, but not formally adopted.
So who is telling the truth? Why do we have conflicting statements coming from ministers or political parties in the so-called inclusive government?
This confusion is surely gratuitous especially in a country that had embarked on a crusade of courting investors to help rebuild an economy that was paralysed by a decade-long downturn.
It causes unnecessary investor fretfulness and makes it extremely difficult to operate in such a highly volatile environment.
There is no doubt that the infighting that epitomises Zimbabwe’s fragile unity government was the source of these mixed signals on the indigenisation policy.
President Robert Mugabe’s party Zanu PF will surely use the issue of indigenisation as a campaign tool in the forthcoming elections, while its partners in government view it as an anathema that will scare needed investors away.
It, however, appears as if there was a general shared view amongst the parties in the shaky coalition government on the need to nationalise all alluvial diamond mining in the country.
Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who is the secretary general of Tsvangirai’s party, was quoted as saying last July that Zimbabwe would like to have all alluvial diamond mining conducted by the state.
“There is consensus in government that there has to be a new Diamond Act that says alluvial diamond mining in Zimbabwe be conducted by and through the state,” Biti said in a mid-term budget speech.
Biti said the inclusive government desperately needed revenue from diamonds to revive the country’s ailing economy.
He said the private companies the government had joint ventures with were not sharing the wealth, hence the need to nationalise.
If Biti’s views on the nationalisation of alluvial diamond mining reflected his party’s policy then it appears that there was no “bad-blood” on this subject.
It is, however, hard to believe that the warring parties in the shaky government have finally found a common ground on the 51 percent share takeover bid on other minerals, as Kasukuwere made us to believe.
It’s a matter of time before we get more conflicting statements.
Mathew Nyaungwa, Rough&Polished, from Namibia
